DuckDuckGo's AI-free search saw nearly 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode

Traffic to DuckDuckGo's AI-free search page and installs of its mobile app rose sharply in the week after Google's leadership again insisted that users love the company's AI-powered search experience.

What the numbers show

Visits to noai.duckduckgo.com — a version of the engine that returns classic links with no AI overviews or chat — grew by an average of 22.7% week-on-week between May 20 and May 25, peaking at 27.7% on May 24. DuckDuckGo's mobile app installs in the United States rose 18.1% on average compared with the previous week, an increase sustained over six days and peaking at 30.5% on May 25, according to TechCrunch. iOS installs grew even faster: an average of 33% week-on-week, with a peak of 69.9%.

Google's claim and the pushback

The surge follows comments from Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who said people love Search's AI Mode and described it as the company's biggest upgrade to search. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg rejected that framing, telling Paul Thurrott that "Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want."

Scale and strategy

The shift is still small in absolute terms. DuckDuckGo accounts for roughly 2% of the US search market, while Google held about 85% as of last month, according to Statcounter. DuckDuckGo is not anti-AI either: it runs duck.ai, a private chat interface for models including GPT-5 mini and Claude Haiku 4.5. Weinberg says the company does not collect search histories or chats and that nothing is used for AI training. Its chief communications officer, Kamyl Bazbaz, says the company's own AI overviews remain popular, as does the option to filter AI-generated images from results. "People just want a choice," he said.

Google, for its part, reported that search revenue grew 19% in the first quarter of 2026, which it attributed in part to AI Mode and AI Overviews.